The Nomadic Alternative – Page 11

tools at the base of the skulls, in that part called the foramen

magnum, where the spinal cord enters to join the brain. But the
excised fragments of skull were nowhere to be found.

The Cave of Sinanthropus was his charnel house, and the
excavators concluded that its occupants had carried the bones of
the dead thither, stripped of flesh. The mutilations and the
deliberate selection of the skull and cross-bones suggested some
form of ritual cannibalism. Père Teilhard de Chardin was among
those present, and the spectacle of this ancient carnage doubtless
reinforced – if it did not propose – his views on the evolution of
human morality.

The practice of mutilating the skull has tarried among the head-
hunters of the world. In Borneo and New Guinea a new-born child
could only receive a name if another named man was beheaded. The
father or guardian of the child carved out the base of the skull,
extracted the brain, baked it with sago and swallowed it down.

Then all could proceed with the naming ceremony. Tibetan monks,
adepts in Tantric Buddhist practices, drank from the skulls of
their deceased colleagues, while Lord Kitchener, for personal
reasons one can only guess at, reputedly had a skull cup made
from the Mahdi’s cranium.

Some years ago the bones of a hominid, much earlier than
Sinanthropus, surfaced at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Their exca-
vator, a renowned physical anthropologist, suggested the bones
to be those of the dinner, not the diner. Anthropology had
become anthropophagy.

But does this mean that Man eats Man, rather than some men
eat other men? If Man eats Man, the simplest, most savage savages
should eat men more readily than others. Yet they do not. The
Yaghan Indians flatly refused to eat the meat of the fox, not
because fox meat was indigestible, for they would eat almost
anything, but for fear the carnivorous fox might once have fed
on a human corpse. The Bushmen will not eat baboon “because it
looks like a man” or hyena “because it may have fed on a man.”